I have a thing for bakeries. Always have. This may stem from the importance of self-sufficiency in the kitchen that my mother instilled in me as a young child. She made it very clear that cooking was a necessity and is a skill that should be developed. Along with cooking or baking, comes recipe development. I’ve found that my love for cooking and creating recipes in the kitchen often translates well into vaping. Therefore, I regularly find myself perusing chef’s recipes on the internet looking for inspiration. This time I found myself examining cobblers, crisps and crumbles. These baked delights are something I gravitate towards, and I decided to give a cobbler the old college try. In this recipe I attempted to use flavor bending to my advantage and try to nail a profile that has eluded me for quite some time. Flavor bending is when you use flavor concentrates in conjunction with each other to alter the way they are perceived. Look at the concentrate Cactus by Inawera. Mixers use this concentrate at low percentages with fruits, or even drinks like lemonades, to allow the vaper to feel as if the mix is juicier. This is an example of flavor bending. In the following recipe I attempt to use various flavor concentrates to change the perceived final mix into something that is accurate to its name. This is, so far, my best attempt at a cobbler.

Cobbler: Wild Berry

Flavor Co.|Flavor|% :--|:--:|--: FA|Apple Pie|2 FA|Bilberry|0.5 FA|Blackcurrant|0.25 FA|Forest Fruit|3 VT|Golden Syrup|1.5 INW|Lemon Mix|0.25 FA|Liquid Amber|0.5 CAP|Sugar Cookie|4

Flavor Total: 12%

Steep Time: 10+ Days

First, let’s dissect this bad boy. If you know me, or have seen any of my other posts, you know that I need building blocks in my recipes. I look at focal points that I can piece together like a puzzle. I wanted to start with the topping of this cobbler, so I tried to keep in mind I was looking for a thick, cake-like crust. Usual Suspects: INW/JF Biscuit, FA Apple Pie, TFA Pie Crust, FA Cookie, FW/JF Yellow Cake, CAP Sugar Cookie. I decided to leave the various graham crackers alone because It was just not the vibe I was going for. The INW/JF Biscuits work but were a bit too buttery and light for me. The TFA Pie Crust was imparting almost a caramel-like off note that was just not working in the mix, and often when I vape it my throat gets this scratchy and irritated feeling (I think I’m going to stop using this concentrate). FA Cookie is the bomb. Not here, though. It was too dark of a baked flavor. FW/JF Yellow Cake is a superb flavor, too bad it was getting lost in the mix no matter how hard I tried, and it didn’t feel thick enough. I tried many variations and combinations with the listed ingredients, but right off the bat I felt like I had hit a wall. So, I went back to my perusing of cobbler recipes and I stumbled upon one that was using store bought sugar cookie dough, mixed with pie crust, as its topping. Bingo. Let’s start with our beloved CAP Sugar Cookie that is a nice bakery foundation; It’s sweet and slightly buttery, and I felt I could blend it into a cobbler topping. Enter FA Apple Pie. The King of pie crusts. If I need flour and butter, and a thick bakery deliciousness to start off a base in a recipe, you can bet your bongos this palette pleaser is making an appearance. 2% is all we need; no apple notes here. In tandem with CAP Sugar Cookie, we get this sweet and savory topping that’s basically a fluffy cookie pie. Kind of like a topping for a cobbler. It’s a cobbler topping. Check.

Next, I had to choose what type of fruit filling was going into this puppy. All the berries. Give me the berries and let’s elevate them. FA Forest Fruit is easily one of my all time favorite concentrates. This was going to be the brunt of the berry mix that was to be blended. FA Forest Fruit tastes to me like a mix of blueberries, raspberries and blackcurrant. This flavor concentrate is bright and one hell of a fruit base to work with for the filling. A couple accents and we would be on our way to a jammy, baked, gooey fruit cobbler. One of my go-to ways to really punch up that dark berry taste in mixes is FA Bilberry. It’s a very accurate wild blueberry concentrate that you don’t need much of; it brings a delicious sweet, yet tart, dimension to the berry mix for our filling. Now let’s pump up the jam, baby. I had mentioned using concentrates earlier as blending tools, and FA Blackcurrant is being utilized in this recipe to “jam” up the berries and make them syrupy. Again, this one is tart and sweet, but also heavy feeling. It brings some weight to the fruit mixture that is needed to make this a more complete profile. Both accents have a dark, deep, berry flavor that adds intrigue to our FA Forest Fruit. Lastly for our fruit portion of the cobbler mix, we add some lemon. INW Lemon Mix is used here just like it is in cooking and it tastes like real lemon juice. The tart and sour of the lemon pull our berries forward, help them pop, and is our final touch. Syrupy and jammy berries are ready for liftoff.

Cobbler topping is in check. My berries are sitting solid. Let’s move on to the finale.

If you have not mixed up Apple Buttah by /u/goldfish18 – put it on your list. Mix it up, inhale his juice. This is where I first experienced the magic that is FA Liquid Amber. It’s a smooth flavor that gives off a boozy vibe, and almost makes the fruits it plays with feel warm. This is a secret weapon in desserts when you want your fruits to taste baked or cooked. A superb blending tool that takes our syrupy, jammy berries, and transforms them into a gooey pile of warm filling. I just wanted that filling to be a little bit stickier and heavy. A new, but welcome player to the roster for me is, VT Golden Syrup. This is one hell of a flavor. Its thick and gooey. It’s like a sugary, buttery syrup. I wanted to make the fruit mixture a little bit more cohesive, but I didn’t want to add any dairy. The creams got benched. With the addition of this flavor we stepped the fruit mixture up a notch. These accents work together like a team to blend our fresh fruit base into a thick, heavy, syrupy, baked, dark berry cobbler filling. That’s all, folks. Start experimenting with different small accents of your concentrates to see what new dimensions you can bring to your mixes. Every flavor is not cut and dry; flavors have many uses and applications! Mean while, I hope you enjoy this mix of jammy wild berries, topped by sweet sugary cookie crumbles.

Sidenote: This is a lot of concentrates for me. I really tried to narrow it down and eliminate redundancies in my mix, but alas I felt that that every one of the 8 concentrates were necessary and played an important role.